The associate editors are very grateful you have stuck around for the second edition of the Girly Brah Review of Books, and in return will try
To-do list:
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Links:
Honestly maybe the girls shouldn’t have a links section. We don’t really click on links. Sarah read half of this essay by Book Brah. She thinks it is great so far.
Jock Stands Up For Nerd: Tom Brady shouted out eth founder Vitalik Buterin after the internet piled on his unfortunate Time cover image. One of the girls is convinced this is the latest example of bluecheck antitech bias.
The boomers are up to their usual antics. It’s all so tiresome.
[Not sure who added this link to the NB section but I am taking the liberty of removing the NB section and adding it here. -Sarah]
Culinary woulds:
Gaby delivered on the procrasti-baking. She baked Irish Soda Bread in a cast iron pan (twice!) and highly recommends it as a quick-and-easy 1.5 hr baking project. Keep Watching This Space.
Amy just received some coconut rum as a gift. She’s going to make a special drink of coconut water, lime, and a splash of rum. Cheers!
Sarah cooked the aforementioned Italian seafood blend. It was good but she made it with a whole box of pasta and it just was not saucy enough. Here is a picture of the pasta alongside some beautiful flowers the girls sent her for her birthday (she loves flowers so much she was so touched):
Sarah also made this french potato soup with her sister that was so good: Simmer 2 lbs peeled diced potatoes, 1 lb diced yellow onions, 1 lb peeled diced carrots, 8 c broth, 1 T sea salt, ½ t black pepper, ¼ t ground nutmeg, 2 t thyme, and 2 bay leaves until vegetables are very tender, about an hour. Remove bay leaves, pass soup through food mill or mix with a stick blender. Reheat and stir in ½ c heavy cream and the juice of one lemon.
Clare got in touch with her Irish roots, or, well, actually, tubers, this past week when she made the soup she mentioned in the last installment of this newsletter. It required that she peel every potato, period. Every potato that has ever existed. But it went over really well with the members of her church group to whom she served it, even though she needed some help figuring out how to use an immersion blender (pro tip: immerse, then blend). She went on a retreat this weekend where she ate something made by the head cook at the retreat center called “Chef Tim’s House Chili.” She doesn’t want to speak out of turn, but she would die for Chef Tim.
Music:
Gaby rediscovered Disclosure, .
Clare keeps humming this song by Mary Hopkin (or somebody), “The Voyage of the Moon.” She thinks the first few verses are really nice and imagines them as a lullaby for a future child of hers. The problem with the song is that it’s nine verses long with not even the reprieve of a bridge or chorus. Just relentless verse. So. Sort of punishing. On a redemptive note (see what she did there?), she learned a song from some Argentine missionaries this weekend called “Dale Alegría.” She could say more, but she won’t.
Sarah has been listening to this Lego classic with her little sister on the way to the gym.
Gossip:
Sarah will be in DC next weekend to meet with her fellow editors.
Poem:
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What we’re reading:
Gaby is only 300 pages into Rhythm of War, by Brandon Sanderson. In all fairness, she breezed through Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America by Adam Cohen (400 pages), and started re-reading Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. This girl has a charming habit of mixing fiction and fantasy. Recommendations are generally welcome.
Sarah is listening through The Man Who Was Thursday. Much has changed since her first reading of this book three years ago, but her love for Gabriel Syme is unwavering. She celebrated the commencement of her spinsterhood (turning twenty-three) by reading Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, which Chris recommended. The protagonist, a single woman in her early thirties in1950s London, only works in the mornings and has a woman come in to clean twice a week. Her ability to maintain this lifestyle leaves Sarah (who works full days and does not have a woman come in to clean for her) even more skeptical as to the benefits of “women’s liberation.” She also finished The Gifts of the Child Christ and has another story she would recommend: it’s called “The Butcher’s Bills” and it almost makes her want to suffer through eight years of marriage to a mammon-loving, cold, ugly husband for the beauty of reconciling with him after a nervous breakdown.
Amy is also listening to G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday on Sarah’s recommendation. She appreciates that it makes her chuckle aloud here and there! Additionally, her current C. S. Lewis read is The Screwtape Letters. She has decided to keep on her Lewis groove until the end of the month and switch to someone else come April. Any suggestions?
Clare finished a book called The King of the Golden City, which she received as a gift from her friend Jess. It is an allegory written by a formerly famous nun, Mother Mary Loyola, meant to help in the catechetical formation of children before their First Holy Communion. It tells the story of an orphan who lives in a forest as an exile from a place called the Golden City. One day, the King of the Golden City visits the boy’s little hut where he lives alone, and offers him citizenship in the Golden City, so long as he remains faithful to the King until the day the King calls him there. Upon his promise of fidelity, the King changes the boy’s name from Sylvainus to Dilectus, and the King visits Dilectus regularly, regardless of how well or poorly Dilectus has shown his gratitude and love for the King. Later in the book the King gives Dilectus something to help him remain true to his pledge: a telescope called “Faith,” with which he can see into the Golden City from his little hut. Here’s a passage about that telescope that moved her (Clare) to tears:
You may think how he prized that glass of his. True, the visions it showed were dimmed because of his weak sight and the mists of the Land of Exile. But he knew what it showed was true, more real than the sights and sounds of his daily life. When these weighed heavily upon him, when he was weary of being an exile in the “Valley of Tears,” he would take up the King’s matchless gift, and . . . in an instant be far away . . . in the Land, the City, the Palace, the Home, it opened out to him. Day by day the lens became clearer, the songs nearer and sweeter, the glance of that star-crowned Queen and Mother, brighter, and the desire of his own eager heart stronger, to see—not as now, hidden and in disguise—but face to face, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who being the brightness of that glorious City, had loved and chosen . . . him.
Crafts:
Amy made this (yes, I copy everything Sarah does; it’s not my fault she has big sister energy):
[WHAT I love it!!! Honestly better than mine.- Sarah]
Sarah is back on her nonsense, this time at her parent’s house.
Gaby channeled divine Eris, she of the Golden Apple of Discord.
Classifieds:
To place an ad, email whatthegirlsarereading@gmail.com or DM @thegirlswilleat on Twitter. Rates are 1¢ per word, per issue. Content is subject to the approval of the Associate Editors.
Writers Sought
Seeking twenty-three year old catholic woman to write an op-ed lamenting the lack of suitable marriage prospects in DC. Applicants should email First Things with a list of every single thing in your wedding trousseau.
Podcaster Wanted
Yet another pseudointellectual considers launching a podcast. Sonorous baritone plans to discuss theology, long drives out west, and chicken-and-rice recipes (gotta get them gains). Philosophers, lifters, or ex-seminarians would be ideal.Bonus points if you are an alleged “mansplainer” or “public intellectual.” Email WTGAR with subject line: “Pod Save America”
Please, God, When
Soon-to-be-spinster seeks young man to fix. You: 25-40 yrs old, full head of hair, good health insurance, well-stocked library, sparkling conversationalist. Me: early 20something, doe eyes, mischievous streak, hurtling towards a speedy engagement. Email WTGAR with subject line: “Shotgun Marriage.”
Exhortations:
Come, Holy Spirit!
Get these before the ban hammer comes down 😍
Request for approval:
Is this okay?